Editors' Choice Awards

Neither of our two choices for best graphics application even
has a GUI interface. Sometimes you need to script something, and
converting any unlicensed GIFs you may have lying around to the
legal PNG format is one of those times.

gif2png includes a script to
grovel through your entire site and expunge the GIFs once and for
all. And, some software creates oversized PNGs when you “save as
PNG”, and pngcrush can go back
and do it right.

+Backup Utility: Amanda

There is a large selection of backup tools for Linux, and
we're glad, because it makes it easier to back up your new Linux
box where the Powers that Be have already chosen the backup
software to be used.

At Linux Journal though, we run Amanda.
We can get whatever software we want at no charge because software
companies give us copies to butter us up. But our sysadmin team
chose Amanda, which stands for “Advanced Maryland Automatic
Network Disk Archiver”. There's an unrelated project called Amanda
at Berkeley, so be sure not to install the wrong software—the
Berkeley Amanda is the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array,
and you don't want to find yourself with a bunch of muon-tracking
data instead of backups of your files.

Amanda is classic, old-school free software—infinitely
configurable, not fancy, but reliable. It takes a while to learn
and set up, but once you've got it configured the way you want, it
should be trouble-free.

+Communication Tool: Jabber

In an earlier article we wrote, “Jabber is built so wide
open that it's hard to see the limits of what can be done with
it.” And we like the “explosive combination” of XML and instant
messaging. With Jabber, any two identities, whether human or
machine, can send and receive real-time messages that contain
pretty much anything and can do so in a structured way,
independent, if necessary, of intermediating protocols. Jabber is
going to be the basis of some fun applications.

+3-D Application: Blender

Think of Blender as the planter for the render farm—it's the
application that lets you design 3-D scenes. But fire it up and
you'll quickly realize that Blender is no Xpaint. This is some
heavy software and takes a real-time investment to learn. But we
judge a tree by its fruits, and digital art produced with Blender
is pretty impressive.

+Database: PostgreSQL

Tim Perdue, a well-known PHP wizard, explained the benefits
of using PostgreSQL as a back-end database for his web projects:
“To start, we will make use of Postgres' SELECT...FOR UPDATE
syntax, which effectively locks selected rows so you can update
them and commit your changes within a transaction.”

And, he adds, “With some databases, like MySQL, you can't
easily lock specific rows of data to prevent other processes from
decrementing the inventory while you are also trying to decrement
the inventory. What you wind up with is inaccurate numbers and a
useless inventory count.” Now, we can't have that. If your
e-commerce site sells the last Furby twice, you're in big
trouble.

For “big-database” features and the configurability and
administration advantages of open source, we give PostgreSQL a big
thumbs-up.

+Game: Soldier of
Fortune

If you invest your time and money in a computer game, you
want to see people suffer when you shoot them, right? Anatomically
correct gunshot wounds. Screams of agony. Simplistic plot. Put it
all together and what do you get? Hours of fun, that's what.

Weak stomach? Try GNOME Freecell.

+Development Tool: Python

Hell is other people's Perl. Enough said.

Office Application/Suite: StarOffice

We must confess something right now. Here at Linux Journal, we're just not big office suite users. We
basically get by with vi until we send articles to layout, and when
someone sends us a proprietary-format document, we just trash it
and add them to the bozo list. But every once in a while, in our
personal lives, we have to do up a batch of anti-DMCA flyers or
something. For that, there's StarOffice. A bit on the hoggish side,
but it gets the job done. And we'll buy beers for Sun people at the
next Linux show—thank you for putting the new version under the
GPL.

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